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Bound in a Gay Union by a State Denying It

I’VE never had perfect timing. When New York finally legalized same-sex marriage last month, I had just gotten out of my lesbian union and married a guy.

If New York had allowed gay marriage in 2000, my girlfriend and I would never have driven to Vermont from Brooklyn to seize its groundbreaking offer of a same-sex civil union. We would never have held our double-white-gown ceremony in a field at sunset. We would never have gathered friends and family to rejoice in a verdant state where we did not live. And when we split in 2004, we would have gotten a divorce.

Instead, we spent almost seven years in a legal limbo that held us in our union by not recognizing it. I fell in love with a man. He and I had a child. That child is now 4.

At first it was almost funny, like the jokes about divorce lawyers being the greatest beneficiaries of marriage equality. My relationship status made a decent party tale, provoking a mix of titillation and possibly schadenfreude that could transfix a crowd until I had to change the subject.

“Nope,” I would blurt brightly, “you can’t undo a civil union in Vermont unless you live there! For a year! There’s a residency requirement, and they’re very strict.” I had confirmed this through repeated calls to the Vermont attorney general, a pleasant man who answers his phone.

“Harsh,” my interlocutor might reply. “They’ll let you in for the weekend to get married, but they won’t give you a divorce?”

“Actually, it’s typical,” I would explain. “Most states have a residency requirement for divorce, but usually that’s no problem because every state recognizes other states’ marriages and will grant you a divorce. But New York doesn’t recognize any kind of gay union. And to dissolve one, New York would have to acknowledge that it exists.”

Photo

Credit
Juliette Borda

“Whoa. That is so weird.”

It was. It was weird to go to restaurants with a man and feel a quiet avalanche of approval. It was weird to hold hands in public without thinking about it, and soon without even thinking about not thinking about it. It was weird to say, “My boyfriend will be right down” to a cabdriver. It was weird because it wasn’t weird. It wasn’t queer. I wasn’t queer anymore, except on the books in one state.

“Couldn’t you just marry the fellow and stay the hell out of Vermont?” asked a renowned scholar who had once advised my senior essay on hysteria.

That was trickier. Todd and I agreed we could not pretend my union had never happened and get married. First of all, it would be false. I had made lifelong vows before a community, a state and some version of God. I had broken them. The process to address this is divorce (or, in civil unions, legal dissolution), not graffiti-ing one marriage over another.

Besides, marriage equality was spreading like patchy sunshine across the blue states, and any state that recognized a same-sex Vermont union might find a subsequent heterosexual marriage invalid or even illegal. In other words, the list of progressive places to stay out of encompassed much of the Eastern Seaboard — including Connecticut (Todd and I both taught at Yale) and New Jersey (where I had recently held a fellowship) — and, for a shining moment, my home state of California.

For my ex, our inability to dissolve our union was neither “weird” nor, presumably, party talk. She could not remarry a woman in any state. She didn’t even have a free lawyer. I did. I had contacted the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund right away with what I perceived as our shared problem. Lambda led me to the American Civil Liberties Union, which led me to Allen A. Drexel, a crackerjack family lawyer who took my case pro bono and stayed with me, heroically, for more than six years, trying various legal avenues to resolve the problem. But my calls inadvertently created a conflict of interest that prevented those organizations from counseling my ex, who was considered the opposing side.

She and I sold our house within a reasonable period and signed an agreement on everything financial. We got a Jewish divorce through our local rabbi. We parted in every way, except legally in the few states that recognized our union but would not end it because we lived in New York.

As the years went on, I stopped gamely chatting about my marital status. Despite the joy of my new partnership, I was exhausted and embarrassed. The source of the shame became unclear. Was I ashamed of some of my behavior at the end of my union? Sure. Was I ashamed that I wasn’t married to Todd? Or that I used to be a lesbian? Or that I wasn’t anymore?

When our child was born, Todd’s son, then 12, asked gleefully, “Is he a bastard?” We explained that that was an old-fashioned word, and anyway, our son knew his father and had Todd’s name. But there it was. My mess had spread. My baby was a bastard because I couldn’t get a lesbian divorce.

Photo

Credit
Juliette Borda

I am a playwright, so I tried to figure it out on the page. I wrote a comedy about a single lesbian mother of a newborn. The villain is her ex, a “hasbian” who dumps her pregnant lover for a man, then swoops in begging for their old life back. A longstanding friend of my ex’s and mine heard a reading and said, “Karen, don’t be so hard on yourself.” Was that myself?

On April 15 of this year, we had our day in court, before Justice Jeffrey S. Sunshine of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. My ex represented herself. I had my lawyer, Allen. He nimbly quoted precedent from other New York cases that recognized Vermont civil unions, for limited purposes. Justice Sunshine adjourned our case until later in the day, instructing his clerk to research Vermont law and to confer with Allen and my ex.

Sitting in court all morning, I watched former couples approach the bench to dispute child-support payments or to quarrel over estate plans. In one case, Justice Sunshine was asked to decide whether a teenager with an airplane phobia would fly to Colorado to ski with his father that weekend.

Watching those families air their failures in public, I thought: People should make better choices, but we don’t. People make mistakes and break promises, but they still get to stand up in front of a judge and state their case. The punishment for wrecking your marriage is not to live in limbo for the rest of your life. There is judicial relief.

I don’t think I fully understood what it meant to be barred from such a remedy until I watched all these people, some of whom had made bigger messes than mine, go before the law. Without a court to put my civil union into a legal structure, to recognize that it was over and to end it, the failed relationship dragged on in my heart and mind.

To be unable to move on, for me, hurt worse than not being able to marry in the first place. Maybe people need the courts even more when we break down than to seal the deal when we fall in love.

Yes, the right to marry is the prize. But the right to divorce is no joke.

At the end of the morning, Justice Sunshine lived up to his name and granted us relief from our bond. My ex and I, after not having spoken for several years, jumped for joy in the hallway of that court, weeping with relief. She flung her arms around Allen and shook Todd’s hand. Then she capped six and a half years of waiting with a classy punch line: “Now don’t you kids rush into anything.”

April 15 was one of the happiest days of my life, soon surpassed by May 24, the day I married Todd in our living room. But for me it was a starkly political day, too. Every advanced society has a court — surely one of the cornerstones of being civilized — and to live forcibly outside that system is to live without full access to civilization. Is there any clearer definition of a second-class citizen?

At long last, same-sex couples across New York are picking out china and calling the caterers, preparing to plight their troths as soon as next Sunday. I am grateful, relieved and, yes, even a tiny bit proud to be just another hasbian with a husband, cheering them on.

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2011, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gay Divorce: Sundering What Vermont Joined. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe